I wish more work was happening in this sphere. I know I would easily pay $50k+ for even a 50/50 chance to cure my tinnitus. Its a horrible feeling to never be able to quiet your mind.
Like the amplifiers are turned up to max at some frequencies, and the neural net maybe even adds an interpolated perception.
If that theory has anything to it, it makes sense that it might be possible to train your brain to reduce the effect.
That's not just "accepting", but it might be difficult to perceive a difference if "accepting" results in "not noticing as much", and "not noticing as much" is indistinguishable from "turning down my brain's perception gain for these signals".
Here's what it's like.
Imagine someone is standing right behind you with a little whiteboard and scratches the chalk on it. It makes this high pitched sound you cringe at, right?.
Someone is doing that slowly, and the chalk is tiny, so the sound is not super loud, and can be covered by music, people talking etc.
But that person keeps scratching all the time. A little bit. Every second of every minute, of every quiet moment at home, in the mountains, in your electric supposedly-quiet car, of your every mindfulness meditation practice. For years.
So can you "tune out"? Maybe if you dull your senses and have laser focused attention for most of the day. But it keeps coming back. And again, and again. It can be confusing, annoying, funny, or just be there. Your reactions vary, as you learn to adjust to it (if you try to).
But "tune out" suggests once it's done, it's gone.
This is never gone, it's the opposite of gone - it's there even if I stop breathing!
(1) Actual nature of the sound varies between people.
Same way I stop noticing sometimes that someone is trying to talk to me, or that I have a deadline that's drifting past, or that I haven't eaten or moved from my chair all day.
The sound doesn't go away, but I stop noticing.
I'll start noticing again if I'm trying to listen to something quiet, and realise the tinnitus is louder and slightly masking what I'm trying to hear.
Or any time I pay attention to what I can hear in the background.
I don't tend to notice the tinnitus if music is playing, or I'm talking with someone.
I agree with you that it's never gone. Though I've noticed the volume varies a lot. From quiet like the background sounds from outside where I live on a quiet day, or even quieter than the sound of breathing and my heart beating, to as loud as someone talking to me. The tones vary too. Fortunately they are usually higher frequency than what I'm listening too which reduces masking.
I've had tinnitus since I was a child, so I doubt it's due to age-related hearing loss. I don't know a cause, but back then I noticed it was louder when I was ill and stuck in bed, and actually I found it comforting then, like it sounded like my body processing as it should.
However, I count myself massively lucky that it did slowly resolve over about 5 years, to the point where I’d now consider it nearly gone.
I know it’s easy to lose hope, and get really frustrated by it, but I hope you have good days coming to you. Good luck.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6950042/
You can send me that $50k now
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